Meet the Team

Willis Klein

Chief Executive Officer

Willis is a PhD candidate at McGill University, where he is a member of the McGill Laboratory of Attachment and Prosociality (i.e., Bartz Lab), headed by Dr. Jennifer Bartz. His main research aim is to use the prediction error minimization (PEM) framework to explain the epistemic features of close relationships, gaslighting, and attachment stability and change. His work on gaslighting, conducted with Dr. Suzanne Wood, Dr. Jennifer Bartz, and Sherry Li, has attained national and international media attention and is used in the training materials at Women Aware. In addition to his work on gaslighting and PEM, he has had the privilege of working on projects examining individual differences in how oxytocin impacts social cognition while involved with the Bartz Lab.

He has had a lifelong love of music, and in a roundabout way, this love of music is what led him to psychology and behavioral neuroscience. In high school, he read McGill alumnus Daniel Levitin's book This Is Your Brain on Music and followed it up with Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia. As a young aspiring musician, both books fascinated him, but as a high schooler predominantly interested in art and music who avoided math and science, he felt out of his depth with the more scientific elements of the books. Throughout his teenage years and early adulthood, he continued to focus on music, performing in every province between British Columbia and Quebec — but became increasingly interested in going to university to study psychology and philosophy. He eventually enrolled at the University of Toronto to study Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy. There he encountered the philosophical and theoretical elements of cognitive science, including the idea of predictive processing, as well as the biological side of psychology through all of Dr. Suzanne Wood's biopsychology courses. When he discovered the massive literature gap around gaslighting, he decided to apply a biopsychological lens to its study. Dr. Wil Cunningham's social-cognitive neuroscience seminar solidified that commitment to a multidisciplinary approach. He was accepted as a graduate student by Dr. Bartz in 2021 — one of the rare Canadian scientists working at the intersection of social-cognitive neuroscience and attachment — and when he arrived at the Bartz Lab, was struck to find some of Daniel Levitin's old equipment still lying around. He had come full circle.

Throughout his academic career, he has also served on the board of directors for a conference promoting research on psychedelic psychotherapy, completed an internship with Lyft Urban Solutions analyzing bike-share data, and another with Predictive Success.

While he rarely plays music anymore, in his spare time he listens to a great deal of it, reads fiction and non-fiction, hits the gym, and most importantly, spends as much time as he can with his beautiful wife and smelly dog.

Louis-Philippe Robichaud

Chief Technology Officer

LP holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from McGill University. He is currently a Master's student at École de Technologie Supérieure (Montréal), where he works under the supervision of Professor Claude Crépeau on problems at the intersection of cryptography and quantum computing. His research focuses on how games played by entangled parties can be used to build cryptographic protocols, supported by an NSERC scholarship.

A man of many interests, LP settled on mathematics and computer science because they felt like the most fundamental things one could study. His interest in understanding the limits of computation — what is computable, and what is not — led him naturally to cryptography, quantum computing, and information theory.

Outside of academia, he has spent the last few years building software as an independent consultant and Pythia CTO. He cares about building resilient and compliant structures that will hold up in the long run. He enjoys running, going to the gym, being outside, and above all, enjoying a cold brew in the sun.